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Product innovation is like gentrification: The more you love what it's given you (safe streets and a hip coffee shop; a cool ad-free social media app), the more you wish it would stop right now before the thing you love changes again.

It never stops, of course, but try telling that to the internet denizens who are in a lather today over the not-so-new news that is planning to introduce a version of its timeline in which tweets are organized by an algorithm based on relevance rather than merely presented in the order they were posted.

GigaOm's Mathew Ingram, who wrote about Twitter's plans, has been retweeting the sentiments of fellow power users who feel, as he does, that algorithmic filtering represents a betrayal of the service's basic pact with users, replacing speed and transparency with the sort of behind-the-curtain manipulations that govern Facebook's News Feed. Predictably, some are even threatening to quit Twitter and find a different home.

That won't happen, because Twitter's not stupid. They won't go about this in a way that gives the traditionalists a reason to leave, and they don't have to. The road map for making a change like this is well established, and Twitter has already been using it.

Almost certainly, when Twitter introduces algorithmic timelines, it will be in the form of a new stream view option like the "Activity" and "Discover" streams it rolled out in 2011 and 2012, respectively. The company won't force the algorithmic timeline on anyone -- at least not at first. CFO Anthony Noto said as much Wednesday, in the same public appearance that is responsible for today's dust-up. "Individual users are not going to wake up one day and find their timeline completely ranked by an algorithm," he said.

It's telling that disgruntled Twitter purists are already comparing the new timeline to Facebook's news feed, predicting that it will favor feel-good dross like ALS Ice Bucket videos and Buzzfeed nostalgia listicles over news. Facebook still offers the option to organize one's news feed by recency rather than relevance; it's just that almost nobody uses it.

Without a doubt, that's because Facebook has gradually deemphasized the option and increased the number of steps it takes to truly view all updates from friends in the order they were posted. (Right now, for instance, selecting "Most Recent" will only show you updates from 250 friends and Pages; you have to go into your settings if you want to see more than that.)

It's entirely possible that, a year or two from now, the algorithmic version of the timeline will prove so overwhelmingly popular with users -- particularly the first-time and occasional users the company is most avid to win over -- that Twitter sees fit to sunset the reverse-chronological version. If that day comes, power users will indeed be furious enough to walk out -- and Twitter will be over the moon.